Andy Burnham’s agreement to provide Ukraine with blueprints to produce long-range missiles could make a “real impact” in the country’s war against Russia and increase the pressure on President Vladimir Putin, experts have said.

Ahead of a visit to Ukraine on Monday, his first foreign trip as British Prime Minister, Burnham announced that he would allow European defence firm MBDA to declassify information on UK components for the long-range Scalp missile, the French-produced version of the UK’s Storm Shadow.

Ukraine and France are looking to set up local assembly lines in Ukraine to produce the deep precision strike missiles, which use shared French and British technology.

Kyiv has for years been using the missiles, supplied by its allies in limited quantities, to strike targets in Russia, but is now expected to use its new capabilities against military targets, as well as building up its strikes on oil refineries, creating fuel shortages for Russians.

Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Centre on Europe and Eurasia, said the announcement reflects “unconventional” thinking by Ukraine’s allies to help the country develop its military capabilities.

He said that while much would depend on Ukraine’s production capacity, “it could have a real impact on the battlefield”.

Dr David Jordan, King’s College London (KCL) defence studies lecturer, said that the move was “potentially very, very significant in several ways”.

Kyiv producing its own Scalp missiles would “dramatically increase the long-range strike capability that Ukraine can deliver from the air”, he said. “It’s not an invincible missile by any means, but it’s about numbers if you are saturating the defences, as the Ukrainians do.”

Jordan said Ukraine would typically fire drones first – which would get shot down, decoy or spoof Russia’s surface-to-air missile fences – creating a pathway that a Storm Shadow missile could follow to its target.

“In terms of numbers, you want to be building in redundancy, meaning the more missiles you have available, the better it is,” said Jordan. “So, this will give the Ukrainians the ability to strike more targets without having to worry about essentially preserving resources received from allies as much.”

Dr Mark Galeotti, a historian, lecturer and author specialising in Russian crime and security, said Burnham’s announcement – following French President Emmanuel Macron’s unveiling of the plans for local Scalp manufacturing in Ukraine earlier this summer – signalled the “changing nature” of the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Once upon a time, it was about the West providing actual systems,” he said. “Now, increasingly, it’s Ukraine building its own systems and the West providing technology and know-how. This is a reflection of that change.

“But, at the same time, so much depends on how long it will take before this actually turns into systems that the Ukrainians can deploy.”

Most experts agreed that it could be at least a year to 18 months before a Ukrainian-made Scalp missile will be used on the battlefield. But Coffey pointed out that it was “likely that the war will still be continuing in some form by then”, adding that the longer-term impact could translate into real military capability.

Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in Kyiv, predicted that it could be two to three years before Ukraine could master production of the missile from scratch, but that the assembly of the weapons in the country could be happening within a year.

Dr Marina Miron, a visiting researcher at KCL’s war studies department, said Ukraine would need to build up its infrastructure, technical knowledge, machinery, quality control and safety regulations.

But she said that President Volodymyr Zelensky “can certainly use all this … as a kind of PR”, after Ukraine marked its independence day on Monday. Zelensky needs a good news story: the UK announcement comes against the backdrop of ex-defence minister and would-be presidential hopeful Mykhailo Fedorov demanding the country hold elections to address what he called a “crisis of governance”.

Ukraine’s targets in Russia

Describing the missiles as a “valuable part” of Ukraine’s arsenal, Bielieskov told The i Paper: “The Storm Shadow/Scalp has been used by Ukraine since May 2023 against diverse targets [including] Black Sea Fleet ships, bridges, logistics bases air defence assets and military industrial complex.”

He predicted that further Scalp missiles would be targeted at Russian forces’ assets and military industrial complex enterprises in the border regions.

Galeotti said that the key advantage was that “this would give the Ukrainians the capacity to actually penetrate the Russian air defences”, even after they are upgraded.

“It would be a bit of a waste to use Storm Shadows against things like oil refineries, essentially soft targets,” he said. “Storm Shadows are designed to go after high-value military targets where precision and capacity to basically penetrate defences really matters.

“I think what we are largely going to see, is the Storm Shadows, or Scalps, would essentially be going after military targets, but the point is, that frees up other systems, currently used against them, to go potentially after civilian targets.

“I think it’s more and better of the same, particularly because there is an expectation that the Russians are already adapting, proving much better at shooting down Ukrainian cruise missiles.”

Jordan said that while Ukraine was already targeting oil refineries with drones, “using Storm Shadows, it gives them extra capability and probably makes it more likely to get through to the target”.

He noted that these attacks were leading to ordinary Russians “queuing for hours for petrol that isn’t there”, saying that the more capacity Ukraine had to build long-range weapons, “the greater the pressure that they apply to the Russians”.

Coffey added: “I suspect a major focus will be on further isolating Crimea from the Russian Federation, as we have seen in recent months.

“I can’t imagine Russia responding in any significant new way, simply because it lacks the ability to do so … It’s not as if Russia is currently holding back capabilities that it could then use against Ukraine in retaliation.”

Creating an arms exports competitor

The move by the UK could also open the door to Ukraine becoming a global arms competitor. Galeotti noted that that “the West is building up this extraordinarily large, powerful Ukrainian defence industrial complex. And after the war, that’s not going to just disappear, but they’re going to be looking for export markets”.

He said that the Ukrainians had “proven to be very innovative in their engineering”.

“It may well be that in five years’ time, we are going to see markets that are traditionally held by the British or the French or the Germans increasingly colonised by Ukrainian companies.”

Jordan agreed that we could reach the stage “where you can actually find the RAF buying missiles from the Ukrainians”.

“The Ukrainians are now major players in terms of drone warfare – probably the best at it in the world,” he said. “They integrate the attacks very effectively with missiles and aircraft.”

Coffey said Ukraine’s partners were increasingly recognising the potential of the Ukrainian defence industry. “Allowing Ukraine to produce missiles such as Scalp could, in the longer term, also benefit the UK by increasing the number of missiles available and expanding overall production capacity. The more missiles that can be produced, the greater the potential to bring down the unit cost.”

Ukraine, added Bielieskov, was now “critical” to the self-defence of the UK and Europe.